Animal carers research
Andy Coghlan wrote: “What’s coming to light for the first time is that euthanasia of [animal carers’] charges triggers feelings of guilt, remorse and grief in many carers but most suffer in silence because the subject is taboo, and they feel they have no way to unburden themselves” (29 March, p 8). This is of immense importance, but not new: my co-authors and I have written at some length on this topic: see The Sacrifice: How scientific experiments transform animals and people by Lynda Birke, Arnie Arluke and Mike Michael (Purdue University Press, 2007). Professor Arluke in particular has published extensively in this area, including an article based on ethnographic research 鈥� in New 杏吧原创 (4 April 1992, p 33).
Satellite spin
Feedback laments Arthur C. Clarke’s lost opportunity for wealth in relation to “his” idea concerning satellites in geostationary orbit (12 April). I refer you to a letter published in your magazine wherein M. Michael Brody correctly pointed out that the concept was originally postulated by Hermann Noordung (the pseudonym of Captain Herman Potocnik) in Berlin in 1929, a full 16 years earlier than Clarke (29 September 2007, p 23).
Mirror, mirror
Robert-Andrew Horton (12 April, p 19) interprets the fact that we select a partner who resembles ourselves as egocentric, and says that this cannot have evolved as we did not have mirrors until recently. Surely most babies grow up surrounded by people with a passing resemblance to what they will likely look like as an adult, and they form their most long-lasting relationships with them. We would need to research adopted children and twins to find out if our own appearance is relevant in our choice.
I wonder whether this choice of a partner similar to our family (if that is the basis of the choice) might be a factor sustaining racial differences?
Northward Ho!
When Steve Jones talks about Fridtjof Nansen’s polar expedition (19 April, p 48), he implies that the ship Fram accidentally got stuck in the ice, forcing Nansen to leave the ship and try to reach the pole by dog sled. In fact, the expedition got stuck in the ice on purpose as part of the plan to reach the pole. Nansen understood that the ice flowed across the pole, so Fram was designed with a hull that would be lifted, rather than crushed, by the ice. Of course, once they were stuck, they could no longer control their bearing and, as it happened, they realised they wouldn’t get far enough north. This is why Nansen and crew member Hjalmar Johansen left the ship in an attempt to reach the North Pole.
Incidentally, Fram was the same ship Roald Amundsen used to reach the South Pole weeks before Scott.
For the record
鈥� Our apologies to Yianna Lambrou of the for referring to her as “he” (3 May, p 6).
Voting vagaries
Your article on improved voting systems neglects an important consideration: politicians take the voting system into account when campaigning (12 April, p 30). Changing the system will change politicians’ behaviour 鈥� and quite possibly the entire political landscape. For example, the “antiquated” electoral college system currently in use in the US ensures that politicians spend their campaigning efforts fighting over the states that are in contention, ignoring those that are firmly in one camp or the other. Getting 50 per cent of the vote plus one in as many states as possible is the route to victory. It is no coincidence that big swing states like Florida are often fought to a dead heat: it’s a consequence of the voting system.
In a straight nationwide popular vote, a regionally chauvinistic strategy going for 80 per cent of the vote in one part of the country while settling for 30 per cent in another might become optimal 鈥� for an individual politician, if not for the political system as a whole. My suspicion is that the unloved electoral-college system in fact has been part of the secret of the United States’ long-term success.
From Peter Rastall
Electoral systems may be more or less fair, as Phil McKenna describes. The real problem in many countries is that few people want to use them. Voter apathy is widespread, but there are also many who do not vote because they dislike all the candidates. A possible solution is to allow them to vote directly against candidates of which they disapprove. This is allowed in the Plus-Minus (PM) voting system.
PM has single-member constituencies in which one can vote for or against any number of candidates. A candidate’s net vote is the number of votes for minus the number against, and may be negative. This satisfies Kenneth Arrow’s criteria for fairness. Range voting has been criticised because it is not clear what is meant by assigning a value 7 to one candidate and 4 to another, for example, but the meaning of possible votes of -1, 0, or 1 is obvious.
Partisan voters, however, would vote for their candidates and against all others with results much the same as in the first-past-the-post. Requiring that each voter support or oppose at most two candidates would give some of the advantages of a proportional voting system, without the complications. Minor parties would have influence because the larger parties will fear their negative votes, and they could even win in a constituency where two large parties have almost equal support.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Typical humans
Lawrence Krauss writes that “the validity of the anthropic principle rests on the assumption that humans are typical life forms” (29 March, p 46). Why must humans be “typical” to validate it?
My understanding of the anthropic principle is that it says humans observe a universe in which fundamental constants have certain values simply because that is a universe in which human observers can exist 鈥� so we are still potentially an anomaly, among universes in general or even among that subset in which human life can exist. Is Krauss talking about a specific form of the anthropic principle that is thus addressed by typicality?
Lawrence Krauss writes:
鈥� I was referring to anthropic arguments that involve explaining the actual values of parameters of the universe on the basis that if they were different no intelligent life forms would arise. However, if we are not typical, then the parameters could be wildly different and yet there could still be astronomers.
Misters of the universe
The fact that stock market traders who started their days with high testosterone tended to make more money does not prove that the high level was the cause and the money-making the effect (19 April, p 12).
It depends on whether there is “autocorrelation” in the profits.
If financial success on Mondays, say, means that financial success the next day is likely, and also causes high testosterone on Tuesday morning, then you will see a correlation between testosterone on Tuesday mornings and profits on Tuesdays. But under these hypotheses, the testosterone does not cause the success.
Coal and cancer
If Ian Fairlie is right to be concerned about cancer near nuclear power stations (26 April, p 18), what about the radioactive materials and other carcinogens released from coal-fired power stations? These are far greater than emissions from comparable nuclear power plants. Has the issue of cancer clusters around coal power plants been examined, in the same detail Fairlie demands for nuclear power stations?
Nine lives!
Paul Mander takes Feedback to task for saying cubic litres involve nine dimensions as this implies cubing a cube and the cube of 3 is not 9 (19 April, p 17). He should check his maths. The cube of a number n is n 脳 n 脳 n. Cubing this gives (n 脳 n 脳 n) 脳 (n 脳 n 脳 n) 脳 (n 脳 n 脳 n) which is quite clearly n to the power 9.
Time after time
In a fascinating article, Michio Kaku errs in stating that “precognition… would represent a collapse of the foundations of physics.” In I presented at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in California in 2006, I showed how such reaching back in time is not in conflict with physics and logic as we know it.
The issue is one of degree and uncertainty: the degree to which you can influence events in the past or have knowledge of future events depends upon how much uncertainty, or more precisely how much information entropy, there is in your initial knowledge.
Paradoxically, the more uncertainty, the greater the possibility for information and causation to leak backwards in time. This is fully consistent with the laws of thermodynamics in particular, and physics in general.
There’s enough uncertainty in my brain that I should have known in advance of Kaku’s error… but it drowned out my reception of this fact.
Boulder, Colorado, US
Licensed premise
As the World Health Organization develops its strategy to combat alcohol abuse (19 April, p 6), those involved should consider whether instead of heavy taxation it might be preferable to implement a licensing system, similar to driving licences.
“Drinking licences” could be issued at age 16 on completion of a short course describing the dangers of heavy alcohol consumption. They could include a provisional period of an appropriate length, limiting the licence holder to beverages below a certain alcohol content. This would encourage young drinkers off the streets and into the comparatively secure environment of a pub.
Anyone who committed a crime when drunk would have their licence revoked or restricted, limiting or removing their ability to buy alcohol. This would target aggressive drunks while not penalising those who can retain control of their impulses. Unlike taxation, drinking licences could change drinking culture, not just limit alcohol abuse to those who can afford it.
The only drawback I can see is the initial cost of implementing licences 鈥� though this would be offset by the reduced strain on emergency wards and the police.
New, improved placebo
Edzard Ernst takes a refreshingly practical approach to alternative therapies (26 April, p 44). Teasing out the genuine benefits of a therapy from the placebo effect can be next to impossible, as the placebo effect itself can bring about a marked improvement to some conditions.
The placebo effect must work by somehow stimulating the body’s ability to heal itself. If we rephrase this as “stimulating the body’s powers of self-healing” then we have a popular catchphrase used by many alternative therapies; searching for web pages containing “stimulate” and “self-healing” but not “placebo” just returned 154,000 hits. Perhaps therapists are being more realistic about the way their methods work than they are usually given credit for.
An important part of the placebo effect is that the patient must not think that they are taking a placebo. This is hard to achieve in conventional medicine without lying to the patient. But alternative therapies offer an inexhaustible supply of marketing spin to confound the patient’s understanding and thus allow the placebo to have maximum effect.
False claims about a substance’s benefit should, of course, be rooted out. But where a claim is not falsifiable it should not be discouraged, as it could be a vital part of the marketing spin. Even if the only benefit brought by a therapy acts through its placebo effect, that is no reason to discourage practitioners or patients from using it. A responsible health professional should surely prescribe such therapies whenever appropriate, and with enthusiasm.
From Malcolm Learmonth,
In his inaugural lecture as professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter in 1993, Edzard Ernst quoted the writer H. L. Mencken: “To every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it’s wrong.” Yet he now claims that “the discrepancy between experience and evidence” concerning complementary therapies “is easy to explain”: benefit comes from “the encounter with the practitioner”.
This explanation is an oversimplification. Human encounters are complex. Their results cannot be tested by the randomised controlled trials that will yield the kind of evidence demanded by the UK-based , or the , or Ernst himself, because they do not lend themselves to the “isolate a single variable” approach that such studies require.
Psychological treatments based on encounter and relationship are not the same as placebo, for all that Ernst confounds the two. Meanwhile, orthodox medicine continues to roll out mechanistic drug and cognitive treatments whose evidence base is every bit as suspect as that of complementary therapies 鈥� as your report that antidepressants are barely better than placebos clearly shows (23 July 2005, p 4).
London, UK
From David Taub
Feedback seems to have missed the most startling aspect of Jennifer Buettner’s new “standardised” placebo (26 April). As a person who is extremely allergic to cherries, I am anxious to learn her secret for creating a “natural cherry flavour” that is “guaranteed to be inert”. Better yet is her genius in creating an inert form of dextrose.
All the sweetness and none of the calories? Forget the placebo business, she should sell this to the diet food industry.
Karlstad, Sweden
Buried, but not dead
The notion of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground (29 March, p 36) should not be equated with the provision of energy from alternative sources. The process itself would consume large amounts of energy, leading to an increase in the production of greenhouse gases.
As long as all these pollutants were stored safely underground it could serve as a temporary, partial solution to global warming 鈥� but it could be a short-lived one. Should economic conditions worsen, carbon sequestration could be halted to allow the considerable quantities of energy that it consumes to be made available for sale.
You don’t need to be a complete cynic to believe that in our volatile political climate this is precisely what would happen.
Carbon trade or tax?
What an excellent article on carbon trading (19 April, p 38), exposing its mind-boggling complexity, ineffectiveness and cost. Carbon trading hides from the public both the reasons for higher energy costs and the time we have left to solve the problem of carbon emissions.
The simplest and cheapest solution would be to impose carbon taxes at source 鈥� at the point where fossil fuels are extracted. This would eliminate cheating and the costs entailed in the multiple levels of new businesses needed for carbon trading. It would make everyone understand that there is a problem which relates to the consumption of fossil fuel energy.
How to determine carbon taxes? Simply by estimating the costs that the production and use of coal imposes beyond its market price 鈥� its externalities, in other words. Governments could tune the resulting tax rate to achieve a switch to sustainable energy at a specific rate.
This is a simple, motivational, understandable option, and also the cheapest one. The taxes collected can be used for research into sources of sustainable energy or to maintain a level playing field for trade by subsidising exports to countries that do not cost their fossil fuels fairly.
Very local research
I nodded my head in agreement as I read Saleemul Huq’s article on the research that is useful to developing countries affected by climate change (29 March, p 19). I have been involved in rural development projects in various parts of the world. In most cases the local people have been bemused and amused by the frenetic activity of these short-term international visitors, who spend vast amounts of money yet seem to have little local impact.
The only place where I have seen a different outcome is in Tamil Nadu in south India. There a local NGO, the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, has had a clear long-term impact on villages throughout the region. The success was due to the researchers being local people who understand the culture and language because it is their culture and language. They didn’t pack their bags and leave as soon as their report had been written and sent to the funders.
Whilst I doubt that my own work has had much noticeable impact in China or India, I can put a village leader in one country in touch with a farmer in another who may have the solution to his problem. This is the role that international development consultants are best suited to.